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We construct preferences toward risk and uncertainty as reflected in the cultural heritage of chief executive officers (CEOs) managing public firms in the United States. We demonstrate that auditors take into account the cultural traits of CEOs in the pricing of their audit services. We also show that CEO cultural heritage is associated with a firm's misreporting, internal control weakness, and accounting conservatism. The results are robust to controlling for other known attributes of CEOs, firm characteristics, and corporate governance. Our study contributes to research on corporate risk culture, CEO characteristics, and determinants of the pricing of audit services and financial reporting quality.

We study whether firms that are led by chief executive officers (CEOs) with law degrees (lawyer CEOs) have different credit ratings and costs of debt from other firms. Our sample consists of Standard & Poor’s 1500 firms from 1992 to 2020, 9.2% of which have lawyer CEOs. We find that these firms have better credit ratings, compared to other firms. On average, their cost of debt is 10% lower than that of firms led by CEOs without legal backgrounds. Our results are robust to different specifications, sampling methods, and controls, such as firm and CEO characteristics. We identify two ways that CEO expertise translates into higher credit ratings: lawyer CEOs are associated with a lower future volatility of stock returns and a reduction in information risk. The decreased business risk and better financial reporting are associated with 5% lower auditing fees for firms with lawyer CEOs.

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